If the technological revolution which has taken place over the past decades has lowered information costs and if information costs increase in distance, distance should – ceteris paribus – become less important in determining international bank lending. We are using a dataset on assets and...

This article presents a systematic and extensive empirical study on the presence of Markov switching dynamics in three dollar-based exchange rates. A Monte Carlo approach is adopted to circumvent the statistical inference problem inherent to the test of regime-switching behavior. Two data...

This paper has two goals. 1) To evaluate the sustainability of Italian public deficits according to the methodology developed by Trehan and Walsh (1988, 1991) and Bohn (2004); 2) To analyze how the determinants of debt creation evolved in the years following the Maastricht Treaty and how this...

Recent empirical literature has introduced the "kill Biased Organizational Change" hypothesis, according to which organizational change can be considered as one of the main causes of the skill bias (increase in the number of highly skiled workers) exhibited by manufacturing employment in...

This study explicitly takes into account that the decision to enter into an external R&D relationship is related to an antecedent decision to carry out R&D. This calls for a methodological approach that, at the same time, permits the joint analysis of the determinants of the two decisions and...

According to Gibrat' Law of Proportionate Effect, the growth rate of a given firm is independent of its size at the beginning of the period examined. In contrast to the previous literature on the subject, this paper seeks to test the Law by taking account of both the entry process and the role...

This paper investigates some crucial aspects of the recent development of industrial districts in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where this type of spatial agglomeration of industrial firms has flourished since the period immediately after the Second World War. In particular, it is aimed at...

The 1993 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a representative survey of the Italian population covering 24,000 individuals, reports detailed information on children attendance of public and private schools and parents? self-assessment of the quality of public schools in the city of residence....

Previous empirical literature has shown that technological change can be considered the main cause of the skill bias (increase in the number of highly skilled workers) exhibited by manufacturing employment in developed countries over the last decades. However, recent papers have also introduced...

We investigate public-private pay determination using French, British and Italian microdata. While traditional methods focus on parametric methods to estimate the public sector pay gap, in this paper, we use both non-parametric (kernel) and quantile regression methods to analyse the distribution...